Microsoft’s SharePoint is an enterprise level collaboration platform that is used by business owners to easily manage their platforms for a wide range of solutions. Carefully developed intranets can greatly aid the internal collaboration and communication. Though there are few successful businesses that operates without the aid of an intranet, but again success comes with a cost.

Implementing any SharePoint intranet solution may involve significant time, resources and effort, but this is worth as it brings good dividends.

“Here in this blog, I hope to show you some of the most interesting methods that will help your business to maximize the ROI of the SharePoint application, both before and after implementation.”

Proper planning is the prime step of any successful SharePoint application. The key parts of planning often include User experience, information architecture and governance:

Improving the User Experience in Your SharePoint Development Projects

Research reports have stated that the unforeseen usability issues make up about a few reasons why the software development crosses the budget. While trying to design in a vacuum, often ends up doing a lot of maintenance work to fix the element that appears to be broken due to usability issues. Doing some UX research often reduces the change of releasing the project with errors.

To improve the UX and increase the ROI of the SharePoint development application, you need to:

Know What the Problems that You are Solving:

Developers often use a lot of time trying to solve the problems that don’t create much problem to the users. There are many users who use the solution only to solve a specific problem, and when they don’t have that problem, the feature is simply useless.

While creating specifications for SharePoint development, the documentation and user scenarios should identify the problems that must be solved.

Developers should Ask Questions:

Developers should always feel free to ask various questions related to the design process and see the user profiles as guiding principles. In case the information doesn’t seem to fit, then the project should not be executed unless everything is very clear.

Developers should Understand the Overall Design Process:

It is by giving people a wider perspective of the development project that they can have a clear understanding of where their responsibilities are and the deliverables fit into the wider picture. Developers should understand the objectives of the project and the expectations of the customers to contribute to the success of the overall project.

Information Architecture:

Information architecture often refers to the structure of the website, its security model and also the navigation scheme. Taxonomy is one aspect of the information architecture and SharePoint taxonomy is the structure underlying intranet sites. It determines how the information on the site is labelled and how the information is discovered from the internal searches.

An intuitive taxonomy helps the users to find the information either through navigation or search. It is worth reminding the users that the taxonomy is essential in SharePoint intranets that is implemented both in the cloud and on premises.

Governance:

SharePoint intranet is for the entire business and not just for the IT. Businesses should always pay attention to those who are managing the intranet of the company. Developing an intranet can often be a huge project that affects every aspect of the business and decision makers cannot delegate the task on the IT department. It is very important that the upper management also gets involved for the SharePoint development to be successful.

The increased investments from the executives shows that the management has a very strong stake in the intranet of the company. Businesses that are looking to enhance their ROI should increase the activity and also support it among the upper management and also the budget makers.

“Thus to conclude, I can say that businesses can easily boost their ROI from SharePoint by increasing their efforts to plan the project properly, considering the user experience of the application and governance of the website.

When businesses consider the requisite resources for SharePoint implementations, then they will surely unlock the true potential of SharePoint development to help in business growth.”